You don’t need a website developer any more

If you are a start-up or an SME, I have some great news for you. The sun is setting on website programmers in website development businesses. You do not need a coding superstar to develop a website anymore. The improvements in the quality and number of simple and powerful website creation solutions available today have made the website developer an unnecessary cost for the average SME.

There is a certain irony in this; powerful website creation platforms developed by computer programmers are, in essence, taking away business from website developers who are also computer programmers. But the ocean is always full of bigger fish, so it was not a surprise when Google stepped into the space that website creation platforms were dominating.

True to form, Google did not just enter the website creation market, it quite simply decided that if you were a business, you deserved a free website. Yes, that is right, if you have a Google My Business account, you get to have a free Google website for your business. Sure, it is not going to be the most complicated website in the world with all the bells and whistles, but it covers everything a website should. It is also integrated with your Google My Business information so everything from your contact details to your hours of operation only needs to be kept up to date in one place.

The landscape of the website development industry has changed. Today, the key to a successful website is no longer dominated by computer programmers, instead it rests in the hands of designers and content creators.

Extensive research by a team at Microsoft Research lead by Chao Liu where they used a data set of more than 2 billion dwell time records taken from 205,873 web pages shows us that the first 10 seconds of a user’s page visit are critical. During this time the probability of a user ditching a site is very high because users have suffered; they have suffered through a vast plethora of poorly designed web pages every day since the first time they interacted with the World Wide Web. This experience has left them suspicious and wary of badly designed websites that are going to waste their time. It’s only after the 30 second mark that the rate at which website visitors leave really reduces.

According to Jakob Nielsen from evidence-based user experience research company Nielsen Norman Group: “If you can convince users to stay on your page for half a minute, there’s a fair chance that they’ll stay much longer — often two minutes or more, which is an eternity on the web.”

One thing that is absolutely critical is that your value proposition is communicated to the website viewer within the first 10 seconds. A great designer, like we have at E9, supported by excellent content can do that for you regardless of the platform that you select for the creation of your website.